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The Apostasy of the Veridical
Apostasy of the Veridical Exposing the Myths of Time, Earth, Life, and Thought A Treatise By Galara Bell With chapters on The Paths of a Novomancer – Concerning the innate quality within mortals to manipulate the so-called Real. And The Hierarchy of Being – Concerning the layers of reality and how they interact, superimpose and collide. Layers of Reality This list is a solvent of all archaic notions. All notions. From the belief that the book before you actually tangible, to the whims of a beggar hoping that the goddess Taria will drop a lifetime of gold in his cup, the varying strata of existence have in their details have only one truth, one foundation, that nothing is real. Steel, hate, rose-scent in the air, deepest love, airship engines chugging away through the sky. The sky. Nothing is real. And if it is not real, what is it? When peeling away the liquid spheres of the veridical, matters of fate and resolve, of famine and royal weddings, cast a hidden shadow. It is an absolute nothingness that is so vast that it becomes a thing. This nothingness reveals an infiltration into our realm, and it is through this nothingness we are able to explore the wonders beyond it. We are now reading between the pages. The reality that we occupy, as are many others, are so tattered and pocked, like a battlefield flag, that this book is just as likely to drop through your hands and through your floor, as it is to remain inert and benign. While nethermancers stumble through the fright of The Unravelling, Novomancers know a greater fear. And while an Ardesh child may weave the energies of Minera into a palpable power, and while Meridian Zealots cut symbols in the air and change the arc of arrow in flight, those who apostatise the very fabric of our being, our planet, our lives, are beginning to understand that there is no arrow or air around the arrow. Power does not exist the way we understand it. Manifest is the radiant waste of our reality breaking, but even that, even The Unravelling, is not real. It is real to you and I, like the sting of a winter wind, a wave of intimate ecstasy as your lover tries to emote through their skin, those things are real to us. But to anyone below, to the side, occupying the same place, to the worlds born in between the pages, our reality is equally invisible. But above us there are realities that surround and wield a terrible power, a callous power. Like a mad prince who starts a war in an enraged moment, the realities above our own can end our world in a moment. They are gods above the gods. And they are watching you at this moment. Superparallel The interactions between realities, dimensions, planes, universes and space *A reality is an observable collection of universes and planes of existence. A reality can contain multiple planes, but only one dimension. *A dimension is a theorized realm that has not been directly observed. A dimension is also a reality, but may contain multiple realities. A dimension can contain multiple planes and universes. *A plane (of existence) is a sublayer with physical rules within a reality or dimension. A plane can contain an entire universe or an island in an ocean of nothing. *A universe is a domain that resides on a plane of existence. A universe without a plane would have no physical rules, and is unlikely to exist. *Space is the vastness between stars in a universe. It is not the medium between realities, planes, or dimensions, which varies wildly. The whole of Minera is not its plane of existence, that plane extends out into the stars. One cannot leave the orbit of Minera and reach another reality, only another part of the plane. The Layers of Realities In their hierarchical order... Overplanes – All greater dimensions, planes and multiverses. Breakwater - The Fourth Dimension. Contains mutable time, non-linear mortality, walk-on-thought, soul engineering, synthetic deity lathes, designer gravity, intelligent dithered light waves/particles Primal Multiverse Interposition Refraction – Contains all time- and multiverse-based tangents of the Primal Configuration, as a result of the superimposition of the fourth dimension. Primal Configuration - The Third Dimension. This includes one plane, the subatomic, and perceivable time. The framers of Minera reside here. The Transcollapse Aether – The manifestation of all Primal Configuration imagination and thought. Minera's home dimension is in between this and the Anagglomerative Celestial Tropic. Minera's people are manipulated through this level of reality. Anagglomerative Celestial Tropic – This reality contains all of the Primal Configuration's mortal subconscious, dream-states, and emergent machine intelligence. Minera's home plane of existence is tampered with from here. Tangent Transduction – This reality is contained in between the The Transcollapse Aether and the Anagglomerative Celestial Tropic. It is interesting to those on Minera, because it houses our reality in a device we call The Veridical Machine, a great engine that floats in the empty spaces between worlds in the Tangent Transduction. The world of Midian orbits a star in this reality. Infinitum Cusp - Erroneously referred to as the Prime Material Plane. The Infinitum Cusp is housed inside The Veridical Machine that is adrift in the Tangent Transduction. This is the reality where Minera resides. It is composed of one main plane, two deity planes, the four elemental, eight subplanes, and a dozen quazi-realms. Infinitum Cusp Adjunct Realities These realities are parallel and below the multiplanar Infinitum Cusp. Most Nethermancers would confuse them for planes, but they are definitely their own realities, having the root properties of both a dimension. Infectus – This is the testing area for the Infinitum Cusp, specifically Minera. It is a pocket dimension with a limitless energy reserve, but has limited physical mass. The citizens of the tiny realm are as equally unfinished. The are known simply as Drifters. Inchoate Margin Worlds – This is a multi-plane reality created by the god Cuhuar to catalog the fates that did not come to pass. It is a hellish place that acts as an afterlife to his followers. Nascent Shimmer – The reality discovered by the Ardesh. Ancient Ardesh accidentally tore a hole in the Infinitum Cusp, and entered a single transduction plane, one borrowing and mirroring the properties of a post-collapse protoaether that was probably used to help build the Infinitum Cusp. It is known as the backdoor, or the silver realm. Novomancy Conversion for Midian stats: Minera Gates There are many trans-planar and trans-reality gates in Minera's cities and deep underwater. Some of these gates lead to the ancient engines beneath the world. If a gate goes off, or onto, the planet, then a special engine beneath the planet's crust generates a construct body for the traveller. The engine is called Diathaka. Most constructs are not aware that a nearly perfect duplicate was made of them, because when the traveller returns, the real person and their copy are reintegrated. Or they used to be. At the moment, the Diathaka is damaged and creating many construct duplicates of people. The air elemental Yith stole a piece of the orginal machine to make his own Diathaka and create construct bodies, though they are inferior to the originals in many ways. The construct Volgor was able to fix his body with a piece from the original Diathaka machine, the one that was stolen by Yith, a device called the Antikythera. Edgeworlds These worlds occupy an upper level of reality as Minera, but are linked through gates, novomancy, and planar beings. The Velmoor Kingdoms occupy a dark magic world informally called Runeforge. The Edgeworld Paragon is a planet of ruins with sparse populations and dangerous creatures. Mekecel is an ocean world with a few small island continents. It is social and cultural advances, though not as technological as Minera. It is a high-magic world whose culture is intertwined with planar travel. Parallel Cusp Realities Contiguous Domain: Coria Holds: Grimhold - shanty towns with opium dens Shor - town of Relanat Mederfield - Relkas Relath - Sorat Vor, king's estate Shattermoor - city of Spar Marat Quarry Shimmerghast - royal forest Verdent Timewier Some areas of Minera go through timewiers, stunted moments in history, or living flashbacks to the past, when near the effects of a gate, like Timegate near Garnet harbor, when a kissing stone malfunctions or through the influence of a Novomancer. There are several such places active on the planet. Jalidon's Blood Outside of Faus in Daen, a keep was under siege after the end of the Wine War. Paradoxical events created divergent and overlapping timelines. The loop has since been closed, but the area is still a soft spot in the veridical. General Volath of the Daen army fought a woman named Alel given a battlefield commission by the Ardesh. The Verek commander Roth was nearby when the battle occurred, but was unable to join the fray, which prompted calls for his termination from his post. The battle was fought with iron spears and magical ice spikes as the two powers brought a bloody chapter to the Wine War in the deepest land campaign inside of Daen known. Jalidon was a necropolitan for a nearby temple serving as a medic. He was helping wounded from both sides until a Daen officer named Grol tool over and imprisoned the injured Ardesh. He was in fact a deserter. Jalidon realized that the battle would soon overtake the temple, so he decided to move the patients out of harms way, but doing so would be very dangerous. Historically, Jalidon was able to lure the Ardesh magic ice spikes into the lake by the temple, freezing it, and creating a hard surface for the war injured to escape by. In an alternate, and interfered with, timeline, Ardesh assassins attacked Jalidon and cut him down before he could draw the ice spikes to the lake. When this happened, a paradoxical effect caused the sword wounds Jalidon recieved in the alternate timeline to appear when he was in a boat in the middle of the lake, killing him either way. Scholars later believed this to be the effect of a Kairos Blade, one that can kill through time. The people with him thought it was some kind of holy intervention, since he bled from wounds that appeared from nowhere. A group of nethermancers entered the loop and caused them to superimpose, and resolved the paradox. Jalidon saved the war wounded, and their ancestors went on to found the township of Faus, which, when the paradox of Faus, was not longer a ruin, but living community, whose history was completely integrated into the timeline. Underplanes The Infinitum Cusp is composed of a micro planescape similar to those that reside in the Tangent Transduction. Minera's home reality has its own Astral Plane, elemental planes, diety planes, and so on. Astral Plane On the Astral plane inside of the Infinitum cusp, the rules are a little different. Transit to and from other planes within the micro planescape is common, but travel outside of it is much more difficult. But, yes, one can travel to Minera's astral plane to the true astral plane of the Tangent Transduction. Planar Port of Tuhwa Ships: Silver Lathe, a star brig. Run by Captain Newajaar City of Urn: A gate city